One of my undergraduate mentors when I studied Italian and comparative literature in the mid-1970s was the British poet, Shakespearean scholar, and linguistics specialist Arthur Henry King. I distinctly recall his opining during a one-on-one tutorial that Dante's Vita Nuova deserved more scholarly attention. At the time I had my doubts. Charles Singleton's lengthy An Essay on the “Vita Nuova” (1949), appearing just over a century after Dante Gabriel Rossetti's archaic English translation (1848), had enjoyed multiple reprints; Barbara Reynolds's “La Vita Nuova”: Poems of Youth (1969) included a significant analysis of the book's symmetrical structure; and Mark Musa's revised version of Dante's “Vita Nuova,” a Translation and an Essay (1973) had sold thousands of copies and was widely accepted as both the definitive translation and a comprehensive interpretation. Little could I then have fathomed that the next half-century would witness an explosion of editions, scholarly analyses, and/or English translations of Dante's self-described libello (little book), including key ones by Domenico De Robertis (1984), Dino Cervigni and Edward Vasta (1995), Guglielmo Gorni (1996), David R. Slavitt (2010), Anthony Robert Mortimer (2011), and Andrew Frisardi (2012).

To this cascading list of interpretations and translations must now be added William Franke's insightful work on the relationship between the Vita Nuova and the New Testament, which incorporates as an appendix a new prose translation of Dante's prosimetrum. A professor of comparative literature and religious studies and author of multiple books on Dante, Franke is well prepared to address the intertextual complexities of the medieval Florentine poet's pseudo-autobiographical work. I applaud that Dante's Italian text and Franke's translation occur in parallel columns with numbered sentences, making for easy consultation. Dante's Latin phrases and sentences are also deftly translated. My only regret is the absence of explanatory notes to accompany a sensible literal translation with which I have few quibbles.

The book consists of various “reflections on the hermeneutics of revelation in the Vita Nuova” (139). While hermeneutics deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible, Franke applies the term broadly, both to analyses of Dante's little book (including the poet's dream visions) and to the New Testament. The monograph portion consists of a prologue and an introductory chapter, “The Vita Nuova as Theological Revelation through Lyrical Interpretation,” followed by five stand-alone essays, which he labels chapters: “The New Testament Model of Salvific Reminiscence,” “From Appearing and Imagining to Revealing through Interpreting: The Vita Nuova's Hermeneutics of Witness,” “Phenomenology versus Hermeneutics (Debate with Harrison): Revelation as Mediation,” “History of Effect and a New Hermeneutics-Oriented Critical Paradigm,” and “Conclusion: The Existential Grounding of Revelation in Lyric.” In a pithy coda, Franke proffers his rationale for introducing each chapter with verses from the Four Quartets: “Eliot's poem programmatically signals the inherently musical or lyrical nature of poetic and religious vision as it survives still in modern literature” (137). “Epilogue: Dream Epistemology and Religious Revelation in Dante's Vita Nuova” precedes Franke's translation of the libello.

The author does not pull punches in declaring his goal “to read literature for its eminently theological purport” (x). Almost proudly, he repeats multiple times that his reading is purposely “theological” (his epithet), in contrast to those who would “detheologize” or phenomenologically “deconstruct” Dante. Franke posits that “Dante's translation of theological doctrine into poetic vision is key to our being able to continue to receive the saving graces of religion and humanities alike in our current twice-over secularized culture and technologized world” (xii). He acknowledges, “At times the theological intensity of the Vita Nuova's affirmation concerning Beatrice as Dante's personal savior and beatifier becomes so palpable as to approach an idolatrous heterodoxy” (3). Instead, Franke focuses on analyzing parallels between the poet's revelatory experiences and analogous Gospel passages, including “the Christian connotations of the resonant phrase ‘new life’” (7). The appearance of Giovanna, who precedes Beatrice, parallels Giovanni Battista's preparing the way for Christ. Similarly, “the apocalyptic signs announcing Christ's death are evoked as prefiguring Beatrice's death” (25). Likewise, the description of Beatrice's ascension into heaven to the sound of “Hosanna in excelsis” draws on the language describing Christ's entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11:9–10). In addition, the Bible's combination of poetry and prose provides a hagiographical model for Dante's melding of the same.

Chapter 4 likely will raise the most eyebrows among Dantists. Although the author early on acknowledges having studied at Stanford with Robert Pogue Harrison, author of The Body of Beatrice (1988), Franke disagrees, sharply at times, with his mentor, whom he considers biased and “informed by the Freudian revolution” (71), even declaring that Dante's “text has been freed by Harrison from Dante's hermeneutic guidelines” and “has, at the same time, been subjected to Harrison's own [phenomenological biases]” (77). From my perspective, Dante's libello, like John the Revelator's “little book” (libellum) in Revelation 10:2, exudes enough mystery and religious symbolism to justify Franke's hermeneutical and decidedly theological approach.